Where Do You Want to Fly Today? A User Interface Travel Genre Based on Flight Simulators

Document genres help readers orient themselves when they approach a new document. Once they know a document’s genre, they understand what the document is likely to contain and how they probably can navigate the document. User interfaces also fall into genres that allow users to orient themselves. For instance, Xerox introduced the powerful desktop genre, which facilitated user insight when they worked at isolated PCs. This powerful genre helps users move between Macintosh, Windows, and other systems whose interfaces conform to the basic rules of the genre. Today, however, users often travel away from their desktops, to distant corporate and Internet computers. Under these conditions, we need new user interface “travel genres” based on movement metaphors. This paper suggests one such genre, based on a the metaphor of flight simulator